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Overview
Before Caleb Carr and Laurie R. King, Carole Nelson Douglas gave readers a compelling look into Victoriana with a bold new detective character: Irene Adler, the only woman to ever outwit Sherlock Holmes.
An operatic diva and the intellectual equal of most of the men she encounters, Irene is as much at home with disguises and a revolver as with high society and haute couture.
Chapel Noir is the fifth book in Carole Nelson Douglas's critically acclaimed Irene Adler series, which reinvents "the woman" that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle introduced in "A Scandal in Bohemia" as the heroine of her own extravagant adventures.
This time readers are thrust into one of the darkest periods of criminal fact and fiction when two courtesans are found brutally slaughtered in the lavish boudoir of a Paris house. No woman should ever see such horrors, authorities declare, but a powerful sponsor has insisted that Irene investigate the case, along with her faithful companion, sheltered parson's daughter Penelope Huxleigh.
But does anyone really seek the truth, or do they wish only to bury it with the dead women--for there is a worse horror that will draw Irene and her archrival, Sherlock Holmes, into a duel of wits with a fiendish opponent. These Paris killings mimic a series of gruesome murders that terrorized London only months before, in a dangerous and disreputable part of town known as Whitechapel . . .
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780312702847 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tor Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/11/2001 |
| Series: | Irene Adler Series , #5 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 496 |
| Sales rank: | 559,046 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Carole Nelson Douglas is the author of the bestselling Midnight Louie series as well as the historical suspense series featuring Irene Adler, the only woman ever to have "outwitted" Sherlock Holmes. She resides in Fort Worth, Texas.
In addition to tales of Midnight Louie, Carole Nelson Douglas is also the author of the historical suspense series featuring Irene Adler, the only woman ever to have “outwitted” Sherlock Holmes. Douglas resides in Fort Worth, Texas.
Read an Excerpt
1.
Somewhere in Paris
I often have this strange and moving dream of an unknown woman.…
--PAUL VERLAINE, MON RÊVE FAMILIER, 1866
from a journal
Saturday, May 18, 1889.
I must be strong and record my impressions before they fade.
Yet…no wonder my penmanship resembles the thin, palsied scrawl of a very old lady, though I am not yet twenty-five. My hand shakes despite myself, as my body shivers despite the snapping flames I sit so near.
I had hoped that my unconventional life thus far had prepared me to face disagreeable things, things that those who lead more circumscribed lives might call distasteful, even bizarre. Brutal. Shocking.
But this…where to begin?
With the beginning, I tell myself now. I take pride in not being the green girl I am taken for by the blind old eyes all around me. Buck up, my dear childish self! You are a mistress of deceit, and besides, the world will need to know the truth. Someday.
How odd it is that when one is assaulted by the unendurable that the mind fastens on the irrelevant.
So I stood alone and undiscovered on that horrible threshold and elected to notice that the center of the chamber was occupied by the most bizarre piece of furniture I had ever seen. A sort of barber's chair by way of Versailles.
Barber's chair. The phrase puts me in mind of Sweeney Todd, the murderous "demon" barber of Fleet Street in London, the city which I last visited before this one.
And, of course, thoughts of the barbarous Sweeney Todd made the rivulets of drying blood encrusting the chair's brocade into something more than…distant and gruesome embroidery.
Having forced my mind to admit what my eyes had already seen and repudiated by looking elsewhere, I forced my gaze to the figures that occupied the bloody appliance.
My first thoughts are unforgettable, and so unlike me, who has seen much unpleasantness from an early age:
I will not swoon.
I will not vomit.
I will not go mad.
I WILL NOT!
Copyright © 2001 by Carole Nelson Douglass
Table of Contents
Contents
Editor's Note,Cast of Continuing Characters,
Prelude,
1. Somewhere in Paris,
2. Somewhere in France,
3. Nell and the Night Visitors,
4. Not So Sweet a Home ...,
5. The Abbot Noir,
6. Frère Jacques, Dormez-Vous?,
7. Woman of Mystery,
8. Call Her Madam,
9. Horrible Imaginings,
10. Carried Away,
11. Rue Royale,
12. Family Resemblance,
13. Rogue Royale,
14. Gypsy Fortune,
15. In the Pink,
16. Jacques the Ripper,
17. La Tour Awful,
18. An Unappetizing Menu,
19. A Movable Feast,
20. Wild Oats,
21. The Women of Whitechapel,
22. The Judgment of Paris,
23. Deadlier than the Male,
24. Morgue Le Fey,
25. Dancing with the Dead,
26. La Mort Double,
27. The Skull Beneath the Skin,
28. A Werewolf in London,
29. Lost Soul,
30. Jack L'Eventreur,
31. Sins of the Son,
32. Sherlock the Shredder,
33. With Bated Breath,
34. Buffalo Gals,
35. Of Couches and Corks,
36. Couched in Ambiguity,
37. We Three Queens,
38. A Message from Abroad,
39. Last Tangle in Paris,
40. A Map of Murder,
41. The French Connection,
42. Tableaux Mordants,
43. Calendar of Crime,
44. A Confederacy of Paper,
45. Worlds Fair and Foul,
46. An Exhibition in Terror,
47. Paranoia,
48. No Quarter,
49. Lost Innocence,
50. Resolution,
Coda: The Vampire Box,
Afterword,